In order to get a constant supply of food and feathers, I decided to set up a simple semi-automated chicken farm, but for some reason, my chickens keep dying. Why is this? Here are the details:

The dispenser is triggered by a rapid pulsar. This way, approximately every 16 seconds a new chicken is spawned, until I run out of eggs. The chickens float on a 1-layer thick water surface to allow collecting eggs:

As you can see the floating area is about 2x10 blocks large.

There used to be many chickens in these containers, dropping an egg every few seconds. Then, they all died (I could collect meat instead of eggs). Luckily, I had a batch of eggs, so I refilled the dispenser and got around 20 chickens out of it. Leaving the farm for a while and coming back left me with just 2 chickens.

they could be drowning. Either in the water or in the walls. Last I knew too many chickens within a too-small enclosed area could actually push eachother into the wall and suffocate them. Fences, I'm told, do not cause this problem.
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EnderMay 6 '12 at 8:04

3

Glass wall will prevent suffocation, I would try building the whole wall of glass, but not sure if that is your problem.
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BlemMay 6 '12 at 8:19

@Ender: I heard that too, but even when I only had ~20 chickens (1 per block) they kept disappearing, so I suspect its not that there is too little space.
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blubbMay 6 '12 at 9:22

10 Answers
10

The issue I see is (especially on SMP) Mobs are loaded before blocks (last experienced this on 1.2.4) so they move before the walls/blocks load. I have lost many a chicken this way.

also this is made worse on SMP as the chunks are loaded/unloaded much more often.

Edit: should have mentioned, there is a fix for this in the next release, but until then, the only way is to stay with your birds at all times.

Edit 2: the only fix I can recommend is to replace all the wood with glass and hope for the best, as you are on SMP I would also hide this whole thing in case it is a chicken hunter, not a bug killing them.

I have seen this on the server I play as well. My suggestion is that you create a chicken coup with a water flow that pushes the chickens away from the walls.

My design is pretty simple. I create a square building somewhere between about 9-15 blocks in width. Continue to use the signs to build a water level, but instead of creating perfectly still like you did, simply place source blocks at each corner of the square room. The water flows will then push all the chickens to the center where they will not try to walk through walls and either escape or suffocate.

I have been starting my own automatic egg farm going to eventually upgrade to a chicken tender farm but I recently changed the water from flowing from 2 corners of my 9x9 suspended room which was working perfectly fine to a still water by surrounding all sides with solid sources. I started adding the chickens just like i did the first time (Killed them all off to make it easier) but noticed they did not last more then a minute. I went into the water flow room under the chickens that pushes drops to the center and noticed they where taking damage on the signs holding up the water. I am not sure what causes this but it might be worth trying to make the water 2 deep or making the water flow by using a source block from each side.

I had the same issue with my chicken pit. It does not use any water, and is just a pit with chickens in it. I did some research on the matter, and it appears to be a bug. Several other people have the same problem: The chickens are clipping through the walls and suffocating. Using fences as walls should fix the problem. However, that might be difficult in this situation. The only other solution I see would be to keep breeding them.

I'm pretty sure I've killed young chickens with eggs on several occasions in single and multiplayer, although I don't have video evidence at the time (at work).
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ChrisMay 7 '12 at 13:18

@Chris: The Minecraft wiki says that mobs aren't hurt by eggs. Also, hitting a young chicken with ~20 eggs did not kill it. (single-player, creative). But either way, the problem is not the eggs as the last 20 chicken disappeared without me refilling the dispensers.
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blubbMay 8 '12 at 14:33

Huh, well then it must have been killed by something else coincidentally although it seems odd that the coincidence has happened so often. I won't argue with the wiki, though. I didn't expect it to be a solution to the problem, just food for thought.
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ChrisMay 8 '12 at 14:42

that's immposibile, the egs act as snowbals which do not do any damage.
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codermasterDec 18 '14 at 8:15

You don't even need water in my experience....if you just build a one block wide and one block deep moat (no water) just inside your fence, the chickens will jump down in it but not up to the 1/4 block ledge next to the fence. Thus, they don't get stuck on anything.

Baby chickens drown if they are left in water until they are fully grown.
There is a bug in some people's games that cause baby chickens to drown when trying to swim in water source blocks, because they are less than one block tall.